webponce rants

I’m a massive fan of information visualisation, and very interested in the Israeli/Palestine conflict, so this is just super, and a great summation of the history behind the conflict.

knowledge (subtitled version) from Axel Rudolph on Vimeo.

Binary Beat from Niklas Roy on Vimeo.

Two fish are in a tank.
One fish says to the other:
“Do you know how to drive this thing?”

Sorry, a little drunk, and a little bored.

I was in North London for most of yesterday, and whilst in the area, had the opportunity to go and see Anna Garforth’s Moss based graffiti, after reading about it on numerous blogs. We wandered down to a tiny little street off Stoke Newington Church Street, opposite Clissold Park, but couldn’t seem to find the ecological prose anywhere. Peering into one of the buildings, we managed to find someone, and upon asking if they knew where the work was, the reply “Oh yes, its mine!” came back. We stumbled across the artist herself, who took us to see it.

Unfortunately hidden behind a big MPV type car, I managed to take a few shots whilst Anna tended to the moss with a water mister.

The letters are attached to the wall with a all natural yoghurt and sugar mix, and the moss, Anna hopes, will embed into the wall, and take hold, colonising the brick work, and become part of the wall itself.

It is a lovely piece, if not for the typography alone.

P1020802Originally uploaded by lilmida

Nokia are running a project comparing things from around the world which all cost five dollars. Its an interesting look at how monetary value differs so much from market to market, and potentially interesting culturally what items will be selected.

http://fivedollarcomparison.org/

Much better than the Apple version:

Cat Support from matthew knight on Vimeo.

Whilst i’m not surprised to see it happen, its great to actually see quantative reports that giving away free music does have a commercial benefit. last.fm, since launching their full length tracks service, have influenced an almost 120% increase in real sales throught their partnership with amazon. Last.fm, who have over five million full length tracks available on their service, reckon existing users are purchasing 66% more music as a result of the free tracks being available via the site.

I’m personally one of those people. I used to discover new music on Pandora and immediately go and buy the albums via amazon - but since its UK closure, I’ve had to rely on last.fm to find new artists, and probably buy two or three albums a month of artists i’ve never heard on the radio - far more music than i ever used to buy before making use of sites such as last.fm and imeem. I just hope the record labels take these figures to heart and realise not all digital consumers are out to ’steal music’.

via [mashable]

Penguin books have recently released http://www.wetellstories.co.uk - six stories, six authors, six weeks - utilising ‘new’ technology to tell the stories. a mix of tools like google maps, user entry, blogs, twitter, live writing are all in use to create new ways of providing a narrative - something very close to my own heart. its a lovely collection of stories and top marks to penguin for getting behind this. Makes me want to pull my finger out and finish off hyperconsequence!

http://disposablememoryproject.org

So, I had this idea at about 5pm today whilst picking up my wife’s drycleaning. They had a disposable camera on the shelves for sale. I don’t think i’ve used a disposable for years - not since i got a digital camera smaller (and arguably better quality) than most disposables - the last time, I think, was at a friend’s wedding, where they’d been left on the tables for guests to take pictures of the day - and hand them back in at the end. The idea being the images taken will be a perhaps more candid and spotaneous collection of images than the official photographer might catch.

With the current spat of immediate update / lifestreaming sites such as twitter, pownce, facebook status updates and just the digital space in general, life is so quick hit these days - instant gratification is everything, or is it? At the same time as these sites are cropping up and hitting the mainstream, I’m also seeing a number of ’slow your life down’ sites - bookcrossing and postcrossing are two examples which I really relate (mostly because I love books and I love receiving snail mail).

So, throw together a disposable camera, the idea of slowing things down, and a little bit of ‘discard interaction’, and you’ve got the disposable memory project: take one (or more) disposable cameras, leave them around london with instructions on how to use, get them back (hopefully), develop the images, and post them for people to see.

I’m hoping that maybe we’ll see visually the journey these cameras take, passing from person to person. I’m not going to put any complicated user profiles in place (ie. now send it to user XYZ at address ABC), its just going to exist completely physically by being passed on hand-to-hand, person-to-person.

I’m sure some will get lost, some will get stolen, some will get just thrown away or destroyed by the security services, but those which make it back to me, you’ll be seeing the images up here as soon as I get them.

Once the images are online, hopefully people who took the images will be watching the site to see if their cameras turn up, and then they will be able to post/label/tag/comment on their pics, and the circle is complete.

So, that’s the basic concept. Like the idea? Watch this space, and I’ll let you know when the first set of cameras are out. Not bad for something inspired by a drycleaning shop.

Don’t forget to watch all new Tek Jansen epiwebisodicnodes at Comedy Central

A team of Interaction design students from Malmö University in Denmark have come up with a simple, but nicely executed, way of creating music from possibly one of the most prolific forms of visibly encoded information in the modern world - barcodes. Scanning any barcode takes the value of the item, converts it into a audio sample, and plays it back on a timeline, creating a realtime piece of music based wholly on the scanned items. As you can see from the video, interested shoppers enjoyed taking part in creating this unique piece of music experience.

http://barcodebeats.hobye.dk/show/english/concept.aspx

well, as you asked nicely..

Whilst it could be argued it isn’t massively secure, to automate some subversion processes, it is often required to skip the username/password authentication process using subversion over SSH - for instance, we’re writing an automation tools which allows our project management team to do an svn update on an externally facing server without using SSH or the terminal. As even a simple

svn update

has a password request, automation becomes difficult. I’ve finally got around to installing the PEAR/PECL SVN libraries for PHP5. Whilst they’re experimental, they do the basics, which is pretty much all we need right now (we’re doing any switching/branching via the terminal still), but you will need to setup SSH keys to streamline the authentication side of things.

First of all, log into the ‘client’ machine (ie. the server with your working copy which needs updates etc.) and generate your private and public keys:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

Make sure you accept the default location and leave the password blank (this is essential).

Then copy your public key (~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub) to the SSH/SVN server. It’s pretty easy to do this via SCP

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@svn.server.com:

Then SSH into the subversion box and add the public key to your authorised keys file

cat id_dsa.pub >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Logout of the subversion server, and try ssh’ing back in - it shouldn’t ask you for your password. If you’re in - it worked!

This is also really handy for connecting to Media Temple subversion repositories, which have a bizarre username “user@foobar.com”, and ecaping the @ can be a pain. You can utilise serveraliases to get around this:

Host aliasHostName realservername.comUser user@realservername.com

Enabling you to simply…

ssh alias

Where alias is, of course, the alias you’ve chosen, not an excuse to think about Jennifer Garner - why would you need an excuse?

The Royal Mint have released the new designs for our coinage. The coins have been designed by a 26 year old who entered a competition, and will this year see his work realised. The coins work together to build up a picture of the Shield of Royal Arms. Very cool, i’ll be glad to have this soon-to-be design classic in my pocket.

via [we made this]

If you’re seeing error messages about missing https wrappers when trying to use SOAP (”Unable to find the wrapper “https” - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?” or “[HTTP] SSL support is not available in this build”), you haven’t installed the SSL libraries to support secure transactions.

1. Uncomment

   extension=php_soap.dll

   in your php.ini

2. Uncomment

   extension=php_openssl.dll

   in your php.ini

3. Copy

   ssleay32.dll

   and

   libeay32.dll

   to your windows system32 directory

4. Reboot apache, et voila!

Ma.gnolia - the social bookmarking application has taken the decision to remove new user signups, relying wholly on the user to have an OpenID account. This is an interesting move. There is still, I feel, a great deal of education to be done with OpenID, and many of the users who want an account will presumably fall under one of the existing providers (facebook, yahoo, etc) - the end-user still may not realise they’re using OpenID. I still worry about the feasibility of doing this for websites with less technically savvy audiences, as its a technology which hasn’t been promoted in the non-technology mainstream press yet, but in time, with increased uptake of OpenID in smaller sites, i’m sure it will. Chris Messina has written an interesting piece on it over at Factory City

A (very comprehensive) list of skills no longer needed by the world. If you can do something here, you probably can’t put it on your CV anymore, but hey, there’s probably a point past when its cool to know it again. mummification for instance. there’s a skill i’ve always wanted to learn.

ObsoleteSkills.com

I know this is old, but i only just heard it, and it made my day

I tend to use notepads to capture my stream of consciousness most days, scribbling todos, and things to write, but increasingly, i’ve been using my personal wiki to capture more detailed aspects of that. I’m not sure a blogging platform is right for these sort of abstract thoughts/comments/urls. Its not quite ma.gnolia’s role, nor tumblr either. Maybe i need to find a little IM+SMS twitter-esque tool for capturing personal thoughts, and putting them somewhere for later digestion.

here is an example of today’s stream:

* US Analogue TV shutoff in Feb 2009
* browser versioning (a list apart)
* wikileak
* gmail spam filtering failing
* scribd / embeddable doc sharing
* facebook analytics apps / adonomics, insights, develloper analytics
* http://linkblip.com/
* facebook 5% drop in UK users in past three months (400K users)
* streem.us - new blogging/tumblr style platform
* http://www.twipster.com/ - mobile publishing platform
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
* setup macmini + server at home

I love you guys… mwah mwah.